Users post reviews of Information Technology (“IT”) items (applications, devices, services, etc.) in a wide variety of public and private forums, such as via the internet and other networked structures. The reviews may be posted via use of a variety of programmable device platforms, for example via use of applications executing on mobile phones, laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), desktop computers, etc. Such reviews are useful to other users using or considering acquisition of IT items, wherein the publication of favorable reviews may help to market or spread adoption the reviewed IT item, while publication of negative reviews may hurt marketing or adoption. For example, a negative review may cause a reader to decide not to purchase the reviewed IT item.
However, the accuracy and usefulness of qualitative information conveyed by the reviews with respect to any given reviewed information technology item may be highly dependent on user context defined by behavior, knowledge, actions and underlying resources deployed in utilizing the reviewed information technology that are unique to the reviewing user. More particularly, the root-cause of a poor performance attribute that causes a user to submit a review that rates a reviewed information technology item poorly may not be caused or otherwise related to performance of the reviewed information technology itself. For example, poor responsiveness of an executing application may be due to one or more of various, unfavorable context scenarios that are different from (“external” to) the attributes of the IT item itself, including poor current network conditions, low resource availability, executing the application on a low end device (one with a relatively older processor with small amounts of available memory relative to conventional devices), improperly configuring or operating the IT item or an underlying operating system, etc.
Accordingly, such external context factors and conditions may result in a perception of poor performance for a given IT item, even though it has been coded adequately and is actually performing at a high and desirable level. Thus, an IT item that is itself performing adequately may receive a negative review due to a poor experience by the reviewer, who in good faith believes (erroneously) that attributes of the IT item are the cause of the problem. Moreover, this negative review actually may actually have little or no accuracy or value in assessing the qualities of the reviewed IT item for other users who do not share the poor external context of the reviewer, and who will not experience the problems of the reviewing user but will instead experience adequate or even superior performance from using the same IT item.